If you like German cars and El Caminos, you're pretty much going to have to either pick up a Sawzall yourself or buy something someone else's home-built pickup. Today's Nice Price or Crack Pipeder Straße is the latter, but does its price make it more BM than MB?

A good rule of thumb is that if an Audi was expensive when new, it's most likely going to be even more expensive when it gets old. And, add the strain of aftermarket mods to the equation and you'll see your money disappear faster than by giving it to the Herman Cain campaign That, at least, was the consensus of the 70% of you who voted down yesterday's big-ol' hairy S4 in a Crack pipe loss, considering it the monetary equivalent of that thing they tried to throw Luke into in Return of the Jedi. I guess that was an auto for which no one wished a union.

Audi's badge is four interlocking rings, which represent the quartet of makes that combined to …
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Etymology is an interesting thing - take for example the word truck, which has two very different origins and meanings. From the Phrase Finder: The reference to a vehicle for transporting freight comes from the Greek word 'trochos,' meaning 'wheel.' However, 'truck' meaning originally any commodities for sale and, later, garden produce for market comes from an entirely different root, 'troque,' the Old French word for 'barter.

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Both uses could be employed in reference to this 1974 Mercedes Benz 240d custom pickup as it is both a Truck in the mechanical sense, and, being for sale, is a truck in the brought to market sense. Whether or not a pickup based on a W114 makes any other kind of sense is beside the point. The seller of this Benz is not the builder, a fact that plays in its favor as he has spent five years behind its wheel, putting on almost 12,000 miles on it which means that it probably isn't saddled with onerous idiosicrocies only acceptable to its creator. Speaking of miles, the ad states that the odo currently reads 00150, an odd thing which means either-

A. It has rolled over, but with only five barrels it's impossible to tell how many times.

B. It's broken.

C. It's pretty beat up for being the world's lowest mileage W114.

D. He's reading the Trip Odo.

Regardless of how many miles it has, you can bet that each one was taken with the leisurely pace of a Teamster as the 65-horses extracted from the OM616.916 mean that the only drag races the 240D would be competitive in are against glacial ablation. Here, the commodious bed implies substantial carrying capacity, however every pound added is another that the legendarily durable, but parsimonious 2,404-cc diesel engine has to drag along. Additionally, the coil-sprung IRS under the freshly plywoodinated bed doesn't make for the most robust of load carriers, but at least it's not the previous generation's odd swing axle which provided an orgy of handling peculiarities.

Speaking of peculiar, turning a 240d into a Teutonic truck is sort of weird, although this one looks to have been done with an eye for semi-professionalism, and the use of actual Benz wagon tail lights is a nice touch. Those, along with all the other lights, and everything else, is claimed in the ad to be functional, and there's a bunch of work and new parts that have recently been done. That's a much better sales tool than the usual needs to be done, but I'll include all the parts that we usually see in private seller ads. That being said, he does claim the interior could use some TLC, however what that crazysexycool trio would do with it is beyond me, and considering Lisa ‘Left Eye' Lopes history with a matchbook, this is probably not the bed you'd want to get her in.

If however, you'd like to get in bed with this Benz, then you'd need to come up with $2,300 and not be in a hurry for the drive home. Sure it being a diesel, the seller makes the tired claim that it's perfect for a bio-fuel conversion, which is sort of like the McDonalds guy telling you that french fries can alternately be used as ear plugs. Despite that slip into Shamwow-dom, let's give him a break as the ad is otherwise pretty straight forward and he seems cool enough, I mean, he drives a 240d Pickup, in case you hadn't noticed.

So what do you think of this catdog car/truck for $2,300? Does that price make this custom Benz an El Camino Real? Or, do you hold no truck with that?